The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront (V&A) has outsourced its platform refresh and systems integration project to Space Age Technologies (SAT), a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and network integration specialist. As part of the solution SAT also accepted responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and management of V&A's IT data centre.
The Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, as one of South Africa's most popular tourist attractions, wanted to standardise and centralise control of its information technology platform for its 220 users. The project saw SAT redesign and build a solid Microsoft-based platform using industry recognised standards.
"As the V&A's IT consulting and management team, we were looking for a technology partner that is able to understand our client's business strategy," says Sean O'Connell, Managing Director for Airborne Consulting.
Airborne Consulting specialises in strategic consulting and marketing communication for the executive market, and provides the V&A with IT management consulting services.
Says O'Connell: "SAT has demonstrated exceptional expertise in the field of platform integration and management services and came highly recommended by Microsoft."
As a key role player in the SME IT market, SAT has become renowned for its professionalism and strict adherence to industry standards when delivering a technology solution.
"Besides providing the client with a sustainable IT platform, SAT prides itself in delivering unsurpassed quality in terms of its solutions and support services," says Mark Geschke, Managing Director for SAT.
Instead of only providing the initial migration services, SAT was also asked to assume full responsibility for the ongoing management of the Microsoft server environment.
"The most important value-add SAT brought to the table, was their SATAware platform monitoring service," says O'Connell.
The SATAware service extends the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) offering and provides an outsourced 24/7 monitoring and problem escalation service allowing V&A staff to focus on other initiatives. Any critical alerts identified by monitoring personnel are immediately submitted to the SAT support team for quick resolution.
Besides this live 24/7 monitoring function, Airborne Consulting and the V&A decided to implement the SAT server support SLA for several other reasons. This includes the advantage of increased infrastructure control, future savings on system downtime, more efficient use of internal resources, and the improved management of operations tasks such as backups and service patches. In addition, the V&A obtains preferred access to SAT's pool of highly skilled Microsoft technicians.
"Our comprehensive server management SLA addresses all the major IT infrastructure requirements of the V&A and allows their management team to sleep better at night," concluded Geschke.
Share